Examples:

"Derp" was apparently a nonsense word invented on the set of Baseketball to exemplify stupid humor. It has been carried over to South Park in several forms, with no in-show explanation or link between them. Once there was a substitute school chef named "Mr. Derp" who did stupid physical gags; another time there was a Rob Schneider movie trailer (as part of a running gag of successively stupider movie trailers) whose narration consisted almost entirely of nonsensical permutations of the word "Derp".

A more unusual example: Trey & Matt wrote the gag song "Montage" for an episode of South Park, but the same song was used in their completely unrelated movie Team America: World Police.

The DVDA (Trey & Matt's band) song "Now You're A Man", recorded for the movie Orgazmo was later used as the closing credits of a South Park episode.

Both the episode "Hit and Run" and the second interview with the Grimmets in Wigfield include a debate over whether a feature of a hideously deformed face is an eye or a mouth, with one party arguing that it's a mouth because it's where the sound comes from and the other countering that whenever they tried to feed it there it would wink at them.

Both the series finale and the first interview with Hoyt Gein include the phrase "Think about it- I haven't." Which was then Covered Up when Colbert used it in his WHCA speech.

"You touch [forbidden object] again and you're gonna pull back a bloody stump," which apparently one of Colbert's older sisters used to say to him when they were kids, appears in the SWC movie, an Series/Exit57 sketch, and... something else.

"The insane ramblings of a syphilitic brain"

"I wasn't pushing you away, I was pulling me towards myself" appeared in an Exit 57 sketch, an episode of Strangers with Candy, and then the movie.

Both Shaun of the Dead and Spaced feature a gag where Simon Pegg denies that Nick Frost is his boyfriend, followed immediately by Nick Frost getting something for him and Simon Pegg thanking him with "Thanks, babe". Word of God states this was by accident.

Brad Meltzer has used the line "I'm not obsessed/addicted. I can stop any day I want, but today won't be that day. Neither will tomorrow..." in both the Identity Crisis miniseries and The Book Of Fate.

Across his writing and TV commentary, he describes people by making unflattering comparisons, and there are a number of adjectives he returns to time and again, including "haunted" (describing Gordon Brown as a "haunted grandfather clock", a pair of The X Factor contestants as "haunted porcelain dolls", etc.) and "dented" (describing Jade Goody's mother as "Dot Cotton reflected in the side of a dented kettle", himself as having a face "like a rucksack full of dented bells", etc.).

In the introduction to his collection of Screen Burn columns, he mentions that he actually had to cut down the number of references to things being as unpleasant as "shitting out a pine cone", not realizing how many times he used the phrase.

"In a corner of the soundless universe, there is a star that plays a beautiful melody. That is this Earth." Naoko Takeuchi uses variations of the line more than once in Sailor Moon, with Moonlight Knight saying it, and Rei saying it before singing her Image Song "Eternal Melody".

The fandom would have you believe Kinoko Nasu's H-writing involves a lot of food metaphors, specifically seafood, specifically mollusks.

Also, describing anything "on a completely different level".

And "If A is X, then B is Y." as in "If A's strikes are like lightning, her enemy's attacks are like a thunderstorm."

Comic Books

Chris Claremont. Many of his X-Men plots are to a certain extent strings of mind control and transformation tropes linked to mutant wangst and peppered liberally with catchphrases—and there are lots, even excluding the characters' signature lines. See a representative list here; others include:

'@&* ^!'. They could swear in comics if they wanted to, that's just for flavour.

"Just what the doctor ordered!"

Snowclone titles on the lines of "If This Be (whatever)...!" and "My (brother/father/landlady etc.), My Enemy!"

One well known Lee-ism is variations on the theme of "I've never seen him this (angry/agitated/etc.)", as used by Iceman in X-Men #1: "I never saw the Professor like this before ... so grim, so intense!"

"Excelsior!"

Everything by Simon Furman. EVERYTHING. He uses certain phrases so much that they have become known as "Furmanisms" amongst the Transformers fandom, and are something of a joke. (Even Furman knows about them and uses them consciously.) A few favorites, with the Furmanism in bold, include:

"I've stood here and watched humans — frail flesh creatures — fight and die for their world. CAN I DO LESS?"

"Yeah. Better to FIGHT AND DIE— than live with the knowledge that I ran!"

"This is no demon, no ghost! It is metal and circuitry! It can feel pain — IT CAN BE HURT!"

"Do you not understand? It's OVER — FINISHED!". An April Fools' Day "preview" for Transformers: Shattered Glass played with this one; normally it's rendered as "over — finished!", but the aforementioned gag preview instead rendered it as "finished — over!". The Mirror Universe is so mirrored, even the Furmanisms are backwards!

"I wish I could share their elation, believe that is truly over. Before he died, Jhiaxus mentioned a name, a place. In my heart of hearts, I know... IT NEVER ENDS!"

"I now believe a SECOND menace exists, one that hovers like some predatory bird at the edge of my consciousness."

"Thunderwing. HNH. Never DID want to live forever."

"No! Y-you were dead... I killed you!"

"If all those Autobots, all those humans, couldn't save Earth... WHAT CHANCE DO WE HAVE?"

Furman's predecessor in the Marvel ComicsTransformers series, Bob Budiansky (the person primarily responsible for the Transformers universe and its characters, actually) had several tendencies of his own:

He often named women characters "Charlene" and men "Jake." There are several of each.

On several occasions, he's ended a sentence with the construction, "[action] in the [action]-ing." For example, Laserbeak will extract information from any Autobot prisoners - even if they die in the telling.

There's also "You <fight> better than you <verb>", such as "I hope you shoot straighter than you think, Weirdwolf!"

Finally, Budiansky tended to use a combination of Expo Speak and Bad Ass Boast as a convenient way to name-drop characters and their weapons/powers: "Leave a few of those little critters for me, Octane — so my ionic displacer rifle can atomize 'em!"

Ken Penders' run on Sonic the Hedgehog can be recognized by all characters' peculiar overuse of "I've", such as "I've only one chance!" instead of "I've got only one chance!", which sounds kind of oddly refined for an unruly blue teenage hedgehog. A small quirk, but an identifying one.

Alan Mooreloves the word "incidentally." Once he starts using it, he can't stop!

Frank Miller often has protagonists saying "No reason to play it quiet" or "I have to play this quiet." Sometimes, it is said by the same protagonist at different points in which being quiet is either a good idea or a bad one.

Brian Michael Bendis is fond of the phrase "You ruined the world!" or similar variations when a hero calls out a very destructive Big Bad.

Judd Winick has a few. The old carnival slang phrase "Hey, Rube!" shows up repeatedly in Exiles, Outsiders, and The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius as an emergency signal, and his characters are very fond of threatening people with head trauma that will "leave them in a lower reading group." Characters accusing each other of something being "on the nose" is another good one.

Garth Ennis is very fond of characters responding to someone else making a good point with a simple "Point."

Greg Pak's run on Hercules was punctuated with characters responding to jokes or stupid comments with a flat "Ha." or "*Tch*".

He doesn't use it as much as he once did, but there was a time Cyber Commander (writer of "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Thousand Year Door" and the "Shadowchasers" series) could not get five paragraphs without someone shouting "What? No!" He was also addicted to having his heroes call his villains "cowards" in lieu of any other insult.

Almost every fanfic written by Andrew Troy Keller (a k a Cannonball) has the main character realising that they're "experiencing pure, untamed erotica... and enjoying every minute of it".

Stories by Total Drama fanfic writer Gideoncrawle are likely to have at least one narrative sentence begin with "So it was", usually in the form, "So it was that X".

Mel Brooks has a bunch of these. There are a few that might be rather generic except for the fact they are always delivered in the exact same tone.

"It's good to be the king!"

"Hello, boys!"

"Why am I asking you?"

"Come. We have much to do. And less time to do it in."

He also loves his "Walk This Way" jokes, with them occurring roughly once a movie.

Woody Allen loves to have a vamp in a third of his movies with the last name of Fox.

Many of John Landis' films have a fictional movie titled "See You Next Wednesday" being shown in a movie theater and/or advertised on a poster. It's also a line from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Landis claimed this was a coincidence.

The Dark Knight. When Lucius Fox begins asking questions about how Bruce Wayne is spending company money, Bruce replies: "I'm playing this one pretty close to the chest." Much later, when Commissioner Gordon reveals that he faked his death, Harvey Dent comments, as if picking up that previous conversation: "You do like to play things close to the chest."

Whenever he wants a male character to give a speech/lecture/lesson to a group of people, he will always address his audience as "My friends..." (Examples, Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code, Senator Sexton from Deception Point.)

Also Dan Brown's opening sentence, of the format "[Occupation] [Name] [Action]," such as, "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery." The people who begin the books also die within a few pages due to some kind of foul play. To be fair, though, Geologist Charles Brophy showed up in the second sentence of Deception Point rather than the first.

He often has a reference to something expensive being made of something rare and endangered (e.g., the fur coat Vimes refuses to be bribed with in Thud! and the chairman's desk in Making Money).

Quite a few characters are named Ronald: Ronald Rust, Ronald Soak, a king Ronald, Ronald Saveloy, Foul Ole Ron...

** And, of course, he has his footnotes. He generally uses a lot of original comparisons - for characters, places, things, situations, everything. You'll recognize 'em when you see 'em. "The X was like <very original, funny comparison>."

"Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl."

One that crops up quite often, particularly in the earlier books, is thrown weapons - usually axes - being described as moving through the air "like a partridge". Alternately he uses Buffy Speak: "It was as overwhelmingly powerful as a very overwhelmingly powerful thing."

John Mortimer has several different receptionists named Angela and inns called the Stag At Bay in his works.

Steven Brust always has a young girl named Devera appear in his works. She isn't a catchphrase so much as a Running Gag. She's a single character, not a reused name, and it's a bit of a game among readers to find her in each new book.

Similarly, nearly every series by Anne McCaffrey includes a character whose name is somehow based on the name John Greene. The character Jayge in the Dragonriders of Pern series is one example. According to the official biography written by her son Todd, John Greene was a family friend who was murdered, and this is Anne's way of giving him extra lives to make up for the one he lost.

Characters also say "Suits."- as in "It suits me." This is in most books and short stories.

He also often uses ironclad grammatical accuracy in places where it's not appropriate, such as having Pat Bartlett say "an U.F.O." (most English speakers would say "a U.F.O."), or Tom Fries's urging his niece Podkayne to use his "handky".

He seems to have coined the slang term "slipstick" to refer to slide rules, which thanks to Zeerust humans are still using thousands of years into the future. It gets used so much that human calculator Andrew Jackson Libby is nicknamed "Slipstick" Libby.

Also, in several of the books his characters tend to "salute smartly", usually while holding something with their saluting paws.

Most of Michael Crichton's novels include a character named Levine. Sometimes it's a minor character, sometimes it's a major character. Other than the name, there's no indication that any of the Levines are related. Also Levy, Levitt, etc.

"The leaden circles dissolved in the air," from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Is a fan of the word "defenestration", including its potential for misunderstandings...

Characters saying a variation on "...Did you notice? I thought I noticed you noticing."

Anyone attempting to read the Elenium/Tamuli or Belgariad/Malloreon books one right after the other will notice quite rapidly just how many characters use "Be nice" as a playful admonishment, or "He's such a nice boy!" as a form of praise. They do it so much, one can only assume that they're universal idioms in Elene culture or something.

Anyone reading the Belgariad/Malloreon and assorted prequels, sequels, and related books will notice that the phrase "what an amazing thing" is often reused.

And he's terrified that someone will forget that Silk is a "rat-faced little Drasnian."

Also: "Trust me" and assorted comments to that phrase, usually that it makes the other character nervous.

Not to mention the fact that almost any conversation of any length seems to involve copious amounts of shrugging.

Although this is partly the result of Having a Gay Old Time, J. R. R. Tolkien uses 'captain' in a manner much more general than one would expect (nowadays), essentially as a synonym for 'leader'.

Re-uses several proverbs across different series, attributing them to various in-universe sources. The most common one is probably "it is easier to apologize than to ask permission."

She also uses the phrase "hit in the back of the head with a board" frequently. It seems that is the only way to describe shock in her world.

Every Animorphs book begins with the first person narrator saying something to the effect of: "My name is ''(blank). I can't tell you my last name, or what city I live in, or even what state. I can tell (about the Yeerks...)." This made the revelation of one character's last name very meaningful: with the villains aware of their identities and able to come down on them in force, there was now no reason to bothering hiding their last names, along with ages. (Jake's is Berenson, by the way.)

Robert Jordan was a big fan of "arms folded beneath her breasts" and "handsome woman". The former in particular is excessively mocked in the fandom.

Then, of course, you've got the many, many times characters "sniff" or "snort" to express derision, indignation, or what have you. Women sniff; men snort (except Siuan, a handsome woman who snorts.)

The phrase "Nynaeve yanked on her braid" and all variants thereof were exceptionally numerous. Smart money says that Nynaeve would become the first woman in Randland to go bald.

Every single book begins with the phrase

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose [in some place]. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of time. But it was a beginning."

He has many, commonly subject to Affectionate Parody: "The mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor...", "A wheezing, groaning sound" (as a descriptor of the TARDIS sound effect), as well as stock descriptions of individual Doctors. (He did not, however, come up with the equally famous and much-referenced chapter title "Escape To Danger", which first appears as Part 3 of the television story "The Web Planet" by Bill Strutton.)

One of his stock Doctor descriptions is Fifth's "pleasant open face", which The Complete(ly Useless) Doctor Who Encyclopedia considers a disturbing disfigurement that thankfully wasn't present on screen.

He also had stock descriptions for each recurring alien menace. The Ice Warriors, for instance, were "a once proud race."

One novelization had 'hum of power' appear three times in two pages. That phrase, and 'bench packed with complex electronic equipment' appeared so often that he must have been taking them off the scripts.

Over the course of his James Bond novels, it's amazing just how many things (especially physical features) are described as "cruel." Only in Thunderball is an attempt made to justify this strange choice of words in-dialogue.

He is also another Food Porn writer. Every single Bond book contains descriptions of high-life cooking that puts his pulpy descriptions of women to shame quality-wise.

Read just about any Magic: The Gathering book that has J. Robert King as the author. Play a drinking game using the word 'sanguine' or any reference to something ancient. Watch your liver and/or bladder die quickly!

Stephenie Meyer uses the words 'chagrin' and 'dazzle' amazingly frequently in her Twilight books. 'Chagrin' was also used quite a few times in her other book, The Host. Those words are used so frequently, in fact, that the fans who love to hate Meyer and Twilight use the phrase 'chagrined my dazzle' to express sadness or disappointment.

It seems like every book Desmond Bagley has written has a scene where someone is found dead with their head split open and their "brains leaking out".

He always starts fights by having Gotrek "Run his thumb along his axe until it drew blood." Considering the nature of his axe (one of the most powerful rune weapons in the world, originally thought (and made out to be) one of the two belonging to a Dwarf god!), it's a wonder Gotrek has any thumb left. Of course, it's because he's just that Bad Ass.

Felix "throwing his red Sudenland wool cloak over his shoulder" is practically a drinking game in itself, appearing as it does multiple times per book.

They have a liking for describing vast rooms as "cyclopean" and doorways as "tenebrous." The first three books in the series start by recounting the same story (how Horus killed the Emperor) but with very different inflections and context, although this is less an Author Catchphrase and more Arc Words.

There is also a tendency to describe characters as having "patrician" features.

Ever since he started The Dark Tower, he keeps putting references to "ka" in a lot of his books.

He has also become inordinately fond of the phrase "[character name] had an idea that [theory about something]." For example: "In his deepest heart [Tian] had an idea that madrigal would sow no more than the porin had before it."

King seems particularly fond of the phrase, "My friends and neighbors," during first-person narratives. It's used when characters are addressing an imaginary audience within their own minds. Depending on the character narrating the audience may be the readers themselves. A less subtle example would be its frequent use in non-fiction work while he speaks directly to reader.

He also likes phrases like "This was the last time [character name] saw [character's loved one] alive...".

King also seems to have a fondness for knees that "pop like gunshots" when a character crouches or stands from a crouch.

He has characters digging their nails into their hands so hard they draw blood in quite a few books and stories.

Not to mention "bottle-green eyes".

"Close enough for government work" is a phrase spoken by several different characters across several very different stories.

Older Than Feudalism: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were originally orally passed down; with each recitation, the bard spoke these stories out loud and re-composed them along the story outlines using memorized stock phrases. As such, the written versions known today have many, many repeated phrases, including "Grey-Eyed Athena," "the Well-Greaved Aegeans" and "Rosy-fingered Dawn."

She is unusual in that with each Harry Potter book, she seemed to pick a particular unusual word to use multiple times, though generally usage of the word is not restricted to just one of the books. For example, in Half Blood Prince, she uses the word "surreptitiously" about seven or eight times. And just try and count how many times a character "ejaculates".

Especially later in the series, there are multiple times per book that Harry gets a feeling or sensation "that had nothing to do with [the current situation]" to show that his mind is elsewhere entirely.

There are some words that recur throughout the series, however, including "shrilly", "dully", "matter-of-factly", and "thunderstruck".

She mentions socks so often throughout Harry Potter, many fans were convinced that they would somehow be a Chekhov's Gun.

Also, Snape's long black cloak sure does a lot of billowing.

Several times she makes use of an unusual "he, [character], [action]" form of narrating, often during dramatic moments, such as when Sirius is killed and shortly before the chapter ends the book says " Sirius must be just behind the curtain, he, Harry, would pull him back out again..."

She likes to describe colors in exact shades, such as Harry's bottle green dress robes, or the sky (as well as one set of Lockhart's robes) being forget-me-not blue.

Simon R Green

He has a really, really bad habit of picking up a phrase and running with it through a series. If he uses "death's-head grin" or a variation thereof in the Deathstalker books ONE MORE TIME...

Also, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" in the same work.

also the phase "Watch Me" when someone says that can't do something.

Try reading his Nightside novels. Apparently many things are "the easiest thing in the world" when John Taylor uses his Third Eye ability.

During the several-page monologue in the first Nightside, and a few other times in the same book, John Taylor picks up "I don't carry a gun. I've never felt the need."

Laurell K. Hamilton

She is very fond of the phrase 'red ruin' to describe lacerated bodies in the Merry Gentry series, and less frequently in the Anita Blake series.

LKH has a ton of these, especially in her (far too frequent and recycled as the series continues) sex scenes. How many times has someone kissed someone else 'like [person 1] would eat [person 2] from the mouth down'?

He often uses similar phrases and words to describe his, erm, indescribable monsters, including "eldritch", "Cyclopean", "bachtrian", "gibbering", "non-Euclidean", and "torn from the underside of _____".

He was phobic of anything to do with fish or the sea. This accounts for frequent descriptions such as "batrachian", "ichthyic", "pulpy", "tentacled", and "stench of a cloven sunfish".

Dave Barry really likes to write "I am not making this up", "This really happened", or "I am not making up this _______" after something that is strange but true. He uses a lot of hyperbole, so this explains that, no, he is not exaggerating for comedic effect.

He really likes to use unusual words like "fey", "anile" and "abnegation".

The essay "The Well Tempered Plot Device" suggests playing "Clench Racing" with the Thomas Covenant books by opening one at random and looking down the text until you find the word "clench". It won't take you long.

He has a habit of describing things (usually but not always characters) as "smelling of X, not unpleasantly", where X is some smell that's distinctive but not usually considered appealing, like sweat (as with Hunter in Neverwhere), which also has a description of the "under city" of Bangkok smelling "not unpleasantly of sex". Likewise, Mr. Nancy's tobacco-permeated Nice Hat in Anansi Boys is also described in this manner.

His favourite seems to be the narration, "It never even crossed their mind..." when he describes a character doing something suspect. A less common one is a character saying, "You're not wrong," or a variation thereof.

Very common, however, is a character involved in an argument/debate telling another "Tell me I'm wrong," and the other being unable to say so. Especially in recent books, this happens virtually every time two characters have a mild disagreement or are just having a bull session about some issue of the day.

Also ludicrously fond of variations of the phrase "The shiver up his back had little to do with the cold air".

It's also possible for capital letters to be heard and many locks and doors have a final sound to them.

Going by the evidence presented in Reckless Sleep, one could be forgiven for thinking the only adjective Roger Levy knows is "fat". Fat guns, fat tears, everything.

David Gemmell had a few stock phrases that he often fell back on, one of the most prominent in his later works being a tendency to describe a new character as being round-shouldered.

Christopher Moore has a few phrases which crop up often in his books. "Heinous fuckery (or alternately, "Henious fuckery most foul")" is used often, along with extremely... explicit descriptions of women's bodies.

Louisa May Alcott loves the phrase "like a true man/woman" and the words manly, womanly, and mien.

Jim Butcher is so fond of this, you'll all but grimace. Other favorites in The Dresden Files include "predatory grin," "it hurt" (as in, "a hundred nails pierced my skin. It hurt."), and calling a supernatural woman "too terrifying to be beautiful" before describing exactly how beautiful she is.

A. A. Milne's in Winnie-the-Pooh is saying that someone said something carelessly. What that is supposed to imply about how the line was said, no one really knows.

He tends to describe things in situations in the form of semi-nonsensical lists in his novels. It's easier to show an example than to explain:

I became a smoker because 1. I was on an Adirondack swing by myself, and 2. I had cigarettes, and 3. I figured that if everyone else could smoke a cigarette without coughing, I could damn well, too. In short, I didn't have a very good reason. So yeah, lets just say that 4. it was the bugs.

He also makes sure to use the word 'deadpan' once in every book.

A Song of Ice and Fire. Characters repeat a number of cliches within the world of the novels, some popping or gaining greater frequency in later books.

In later books, characters say "little and less," and "much and more" a lot. They pop up in the narration, and are used by various characters. You can expect to see one or the other about once every three chapters.

Another phrase that is used by many characters is "dark wings, dark words."

Also, "Words are wind," is used in the fifth book with a startling frequency.

Characters are often said to be "green as summer grass."

Characters often describe any long distance as "a thousand leagues" or "thousands of leagues," even though 1,000 leagues is 3,000 miles, which would usually be an absurdly long distance in context. Characters seem to be exaggerating for effect. Also, given the technology level of the world, cartography isn't exactly a popularly known science.

After book three Tyrion chapters frequently use the phrase "wherever whores go." Jon Snow is also a Phrase Catcher for "you know nothing Jon Snow."

Martin also has the tendency to use the word "ululating" with great frequency. If someone is chanting or making a wordless cry, expect it to be described this way.

In A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, it was the name of a major character in the plot. He just happens to be dead. Our two leads chose him as their term paper author before learning this fact. Fortunately, one of them has a bored grandpa...

Melinda Metz, author of the Roswell High series and the Fingerprints series, uses the sentence "[Character] wasn't going to wait for an ingraved invitation" multiple times in both works to demonstrate someone leaping to do something at the first chance they got.

Neal Stephenson isn't interested in "Japan". It's always "Nippon", which is peopled by "Nipponese". This is fine in the parts of Cryptonomicon that were set in WWII, when that was apparently the common moniker, but makes less sense in the 1990s part of Cryptonomicon or in Snow Crash or in The Baroque Cycle, which is set in the late 17th/early 18th century. Perhaps this is what he does instead of putting in airships. This is generally more of a thing that the narrator does; characters frequently refer to Japan.

P. G. Wodehouse had scads of these; mark, for example, the number of times he compares the eyes of characters to those of (different varieties of) fish, or likens a character's expression of disgust to that of someone fishing a caterpillar out of a salad.

Both of Dave Stone's Doctor Who New Adventures novels include the phrase "Kill you! Kill you now and make you dead!" He's also fond of apparently finishing a sentence and then adding modifiers to it after the full stop. For some reason. At some point.

Multiple characters across the books refer to male genitalia as "the fruits", especially in the context of them being injured. The euphemism seems to be favored by people of multiple cultures, and is even used by characters who are otherwise prone to more direct profanity.

There's a repeated phrase (usually when Shivers, the Bloody Nine, or Black Dow are threatening to kill/about to kill someone) about being close enough to kiss their victim/being as close as a lover/or something to that effect to get at the almost sexual thrill they get from murder.

On several occasions, after being exposed to a very frightening situation that threatened their life, a character will reference being cold and wet on the back of their legs- a roundabout way of saying they pissed themselves from fear.

James Sallis has, especially in his "Drive" series, a tendency to describe both the music and the food of any given situation. Things like describing the music in a scene as "slippery and eel-like. Sinatra, maybe" and going into detail about the "steaks smothered in a slurry of peppers, beans and onion. Pimento-studded rice, hand-shaped tortillas."

In John Vornholt's Star Trek novels, there are frequent occurrences of "so-and-so plied his/her console."

Dennis Wheatley often opened his "Modern Musketeer" novels with two of the characters at a lavish dinner. More than once he used the phrase "(Character 1) and (Character 2) had gone into dinner at eight o'clock, but coffee was not served until after ten" followed by a few paragraphs of food porn describing the menu and surroundings... then the two diners would discuss their reason for meeting, usually to plan the rescue of one of their friends.

The most common are: the number 47 (originated by TNG writer Joe Menosky, later adopted wholeheartedly by other writers) and the name "Bozeman" (usually as a place or ship, and in reality the hometown of writer and producer Brannon Braga).

There's a tradition of one of the main characters calmly saying 'Now would be a good time,' when they're waiting for a last-second transport away from a life-threatening situation.

Russel T. Davies

It seems in his work, most notably Doctor Who, he is apparently very fond of the word "burn" to mean "be destroyed." The Time Lords burned. Skaro burned. Gallifrey burned. The Earth burns. Donna will burn. You'd think the whole galaxy was made of matchsticks.

He also has a very noticeable penchant for giving grandiose, incredibly abstract names to things that are only mentioned in the very, very briefest of throwaway lines. The Skaro Degradations, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King, the Army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres, the Medusa Cascade, the Silver Cloak... The list goes on.

Professor Yana tells Martha that he and his pocket watch were found "on the shores of the Silver Devastation". Awesome!

Steven Moffat is rather fond of his "What will you do with it? Assemble cabinets?" joke at the sonic screwdriver's expense.

If David Mitchell is around, you'll probably hear the word "massive" used with peculiar emphasis... not necessarily by him.

In Babylon 5 and its spinoffs, J. Michael Straczynski loves naming characters "Elizabeth" or "David". The former includes Elizabeth Lochley, Elizabeth Sheridan, and Elizabeth Trent, while the latter includes David Corwin, Jeffery David Sinclair, David Mckintyre, two David Sheridans, and David Martell.

The Daily Show. It has a number of Running Gags, but the writers have always gone well out of their way to insert certain phrases into stories whenever they can.

Wesley Willis uses the phrase "Rock Over London / Rock On Chicago" towards the end of EVERY song and follows it by reciting a company jingle.

Marilyn Manson has a love for the number 15, due to being born on January 5th. As such, the number appears again and again in art, lyrics, titles, and is even tattooed behind one of his ears. For a few years, his name was even stylized as "Mar1lyn Man5on", which reappeared on the cover of a single over a decade later.

Four completely different songs by Sting (The Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" and "Oh My God" from Synchronicity; and Sting's solo songs "Seven Days" and "If You Love Someone, Set Them Free") feature the following lyric:

Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met,

There's a whole wiki devoted to keeping track of all the cross-references and recurring images in The Hold Steady's lyrics. Various characters get "high as hell" and/or "born again," tend to be in search of a "saviour," and praise drugs with a "five-second delivery;" all kinds of things are described as "hot [and] soft;" the title of their first album, Almost Killed Me, appears in half a dozen songs, and even the name of the band comes up on a few occasions ("It's hard to hold it steady when half your friends are dead already.") Lampshaded in "The Cattle and The Creeping Things": "Hard drugs are for bartenders — I think I might have mentioned that before."

The band Savatage has used a pair of recurring verses, "I never wanted to know, never wanted to see-" and "I am the way, I am the light-" in between three songs off three albums, "When the Crowds are Gone" (Gutter Ballet), "Believe" (Streets), and "Alone You Breathe" (Handful of Rain). Of them, "Believe" makes use of both.

Rolf Kasparek of Running Wild is fond using the "Wild and free!" line on his songs.

Ronnie James Dio has numerous songs with some combination of "I am/you are/life is" like "a wheel/a rainbow/a never ending journey" ("Self Portrait", "Wishing Well", "Rainbow in the Dark", among others). He also employed an "evil woman" trope about once per album (i.e., "Starstruck", "Lady Evil", "Don't Talk to Strangers"). Fittingly, he sang in Rainbow with Ritchie Blackmore, who frequently reused the riffs from "Speed King", "Smoke on the Water", "Woman From Tokyo", and "Burn" as new songs, with only slight variations.

Pioneering Speed Metal band Riot wrote two separate songs named "Run For Your Life" at different points in their career.

"Hold on" is definitely this for Gary Barlow since Take That reformed. He can't go an album without including it in their lyrics.

The reason that the NINwiki has a list of recurring lyrics in Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails works. Two examples are "a million miles away", and "nothing can stop me now".

"Kurikaesareru shougyou mujou, yomigaeru seiteki shoudou" (impermanence repeats itself, sexual pulse arises again) is a phrase heavily featured on each of Japanese experimental rock band Zazen Boys' (led by former Number Girl frontman Mukai Shutoku) albums.

Keith Urban has several. Among them are references to the sun shining, driving in a car and/or listening to the radio, and variations the phrase "yes, you did".

Oasis (or their main songwriter, guitarist Noel Gallagher, loves to use the word "Shine". This is made more prevalent when you consider that their singer Liam Gallagher has an... unusual pronunciation of shine, making it sound more like sheeeiiiiiiiiiyne. You'd think that it was done on purpose, for the songwriters own amusement.

Any Nightwish song title has the potential to become one of these. The number of century children, dead boys, and ocean souls is staggering, and it seems like there will soon be just as many meadows of heaven.

Many Charles Wesley hymns have phrases or key words that show up repeatedly, such as "atone". He also tended to reuse a lot of slant rhymes, such as claim/lamb and prove/love.

Pitbull randomly exclaims "dale" (pronounced "dah-lay") in every one of his songs, often multiple times.

He loves naming cities, often three in a song and not necessarily the same cities across songs.

Soviet/Russian rock musician Boris Grebenschikov uses the words "beyond the glass" or "on the other side of the glass" a lot.

Pizzicato Five had a deliberately cultivated catchphrase, "A new stereophonic sound spectacular!". It turned up at least once on most of their albums, usually as sampled speech.

Da Yoopers frequently use deer/beer as a Stock Rhyme. They also frequently use Finnish slang such as "Sisu" (roughly, "determination").

Feeder had several recurring themes about plastic in their first few albums (their first full length album was even called Polythene), usually as a stifling or choking coating, with three songs having lines about being wrapped in cellophane. Also common are suffocation/drowning lyrics, their third album has two songs with almost identical lines ("Under the Water, Don't think we'll recover" / "It's dragging me under, Don't think I'll recover")

Newspaper Comics

Peanuts is full of these—mostly expressions of dismay, since Charles M. Schulz didn't swear in Real Life. Good grief.

While a lot of the phrases used in Snoopy's mind are genuine catchphrases (most notably: "It was a dark and stormy night", which Schulz made his own), the way most of his fantasies begin with a simple "here's" ("Here's Joe Cool hanging out at the dorm", "Here's the World War I flying ace", "Here's the world-famous lawyer") is more of a verbal tic.

One of Schulz's idiosyncrasies is that he puts nicknames (other than those that are variants of a given name) into inverted commas - thus it is not "Peppermint Patty" but "'Peppermint' Patty". This even applies to Snoopy's biplane: "Here's the World War I flying ace in his Sopwith 'Camel' zooming through the air..."

For a time in the 1980s, characters in Garfield were very fond of responding to situations with the word "natch" (short for "naturally"). The word was used as a punchline on at least two occasions.

In Space Kid the team's headquarters is always introduced as "the vigilant space station known as Space Kid Island". Space Kid himself frequently summons the others to action by saying "Let's rocket, team!"

In El Goonish Shive, most of the monstrous characters emit a distinctive "Skree" noise at least once despite having completely different origins and forms.

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